I wake to stars behind my eyes, pinwheels and kaleidoscopes of darkening dreams.
Tasting poetry, I stepped into the morning, tiny flakes of crystal cold melting into my hair and weeping down my jacket. The argument, caught in my teeth, that thing by which nothing greater can be thought is thought and thought again and draped, hanging out in the sun and dripping soapy water on the grass.
That thing, that noun, the encompassing arrogance robbing language with letters and blank slates that veil perceptions, assumptions. With groanings that cannot be uttered, as though my wrung out soul were washed in words, words, words. My hand, ebbing the tide of inky madness pouring unstopped from my eyes. My trailing fingers, my gasping breath pushing against the water.
Named and unnamed, life and universe, what I know and don’t know ripping in pieces the careful hope I have crafted. Built on words which dry out—raisins in the sun— and loves long gone on dusty roads.
Burrowed into a couch, the screen governs my imagination and ends with Frodo gone to safety, into the west. As though the eye of Sauron fell today, and yesterday, and forever, as though the sons of Gondor and of Rohan were eternally circled in sanctity, as though the age of mankind could hold at bay the hours of wolves and shattered shields. And yes, at last, the burden is over and done, but some scars are too deep to return to. And forever the words swim through my sunken mind, Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
And we are the hollow men. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response falls the shadow. Life is very long. We are the broken and the lost, we are the weary and the weeping, we are Original Sin.
Power to the people? Power to this race of evolving souls who feel more deeply than death, who murder and create, who see beauty and who seek truth. Hosanna, save us, we are stuck between the lines of black and white, waiting for the light though we are underground, spinning past the world through subway doors and careening buses.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
A whimper like mother Eve, who said she was deceived as she saved the human race forever. A whimper like Jehovah, who hung from a cross and plead for an answer from silence. A whimper like Joan of France who burned her youth away and would not relinquish her grip on heaven. A whimper like mine, in the dead of night, when the walls close in and the prayer cannot hold words.
Eve, you to whom all living owes blood and vibrancy, can no one know why it was that you took that first bite? Eve, my mother, did you weep to know that you were tricked, manipulated into darkness for your sacrifice? And when your choice was full and hope grew again, did you ever wonder why the beauty came from facade?
Perhaps I am deceived. Tricked, manipulated into darkness by beauty and love that carries the voices of the world. Perhaps this tapestry of color and light is no more than distraction, clever ploy that disguises something rotting from the inside. Perhaps these voices, these millions of suppressed representatives who are finally speaking out, perhaps they are the light, but I am the fire. Or maybe the light is higher than us all, and we can only listen.
And we’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheatin’ cheatin’ cheatin.’
Cello notes sing out from my lightly beating heart, breaking wide for all of the music that will never be played, never be heard. And Sonny pours his soul into the merciless black and white of piano keys, and he gives all. So at last, at last the brothers know.
While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
We suffer, we hurt in this never ending narrative of mortality producing the same agony and ecstasy. But in the lump sum of moral faces, in this mass entity that weeps and sighs together, sad echoes linger in the hemisphere and symphonies fade into tuning pitches, and it is only the raw tapestry that greets my unwashed eyes. For the madness, it is creation that speaks. It is the organization of newness, the reordering of material, the listening to notes centuries old. It is the action, stepping onto the canvas of this life to listen, speak, hurt.
I am born again, and again, and again, standing where I stand in the embryo of creation, liberating the membranes of my mind, moving from passivity of observance to the action of interpretation. I participate, I accept and reject, I stand in the line of fire and burn.
Get thee to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to paint her face an inch thick. Lady Ophelia, I will weep for you. I will weep for your mind which was broken and your heart which was weary. But I will wake to dream, and dream to wake, and act to place these pieces into wholeness.
Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom.
I might understand your choice in the shadows. I too might know that I’m the hero of my story, red on my forehead and conviction in my bones. I might believe that meaning is mine and cannot be told.
To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words….
I wake to stars behind my eyes, and weeping fires on a summer day all to explain why I whisper that my thoughts are ashes. I am as a Phoenix, rising to sweep galaxies with hope.
